"Bias Best"

Before the conference of Anglo-American historians, meeting last week in London, went Premier Stanley Baldwin of Britain to welcome them and to enunciate a Tory view of historical writing that caused a flurry of international comment, mostly favorable. Said Mr. Baldwin: "I am quite sure that if you try to bring up youth on entirely unbiased history he will never read it. I prefer my own method of getting a vivid picture first and correcting it afterwards; because, generally speaking, you do not want to be fair until you are grown up. ... I think that to try to make young people see every side and sit on the fence would be to train up a generation of mug-wumps who would be singularly ineffective in practical life. . . ."

Mr. Baldwin explained that his own reading of history had begun with Froissart, going on to Scott, Macaulay, Froude, Carlyle, Clarendon. He dwelt upon the opportunity for some historian to deal with the American Revolution from the viewpoint of the men who fought against Washington, from the viewpoint of "Old England" to whom the Revolution was, at the time, not an epoch-making event but simply a regrettable incident. Polite answers from the U. S. historians present greeted these remarks, but minds went back to ponder the proposition that bias is best in history. ... It was a reactionary proposition, quite out of line with the best liberal pedagogy of the day and with the ironic resurrection of "mauve" and "dreadful" decades now so popular in the U. S. But without bias, Mr. Baldwin's listeners reflected, there might be nothing left of party, or even of national, spirit among men. Even supposing impartial history could be made readable, the stunting effect of philosophical detachment upon young people's emotional equipment would be fearful to contemplate. They might never have the slightest desire to rush out to war for the motherland. They might reason so broadly about government that fine old political issues would become meaningless and forgotten, and states would perhaps fall into the hands of dreadfully efficient automatons like the ones Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells put in their books, with no axes to grind, no slogans to shout and no fine frenzies to indulge.